Land O’Lakes uses Azure Data Manager for Agriculture to support more efficient, sustainable farming

No one can control the weather, but the livelihood of farmers who grow our nation’s food depends on their ability to make important decisions rain or shine. Land O’Lakes saw a critical need to help the thousands of growers in its member-owned cooperative chart the unknown. 

“There are curveballs thrown at our farmers every single year,” says Teddy Bekele, Chief Technology Officer at Land O’Lakes. “Climate conditions that are changing every day, crop prices that are moving consistently and with a lot of volatility, as well as consumer demands changing on a regular basis.”

Tom Ryan, President at Truterra, the sustainability division of Land O’Lakes adds, “It’s a margin-compressing environment. In addition, our farmers are dealing with fluctuations in the price of inputs like seed, feed, fertilizer, or crop protection.” With so many variables threatening farmers’ bottom line, Land O’Lakes wanted to support farmers with relevant data that could help them make more informed decisions in the field. To help growers increase profits, operate more efficiently, and adopt sustainable practices that benefit the environment and farm operations for the long-term, the company looked to Microsoft for a solution.

Harnessing a wealth of data to provide actionable insights

Bekele says there is a lot of data to draw from on every farm. The company can capture live information across factors such as crop yield, soil fertility, and seed placement along with conditions that change daily like temperature, humidity, and other weather patterns.

“The beauty is we have lots of data sets. We have information coming from drones, irrigation systems, soil moisture probes, and weather stations. This is all great information, but it’s all disparate data sets,” says Bekele.” Our job is to bring all the information together to make sense of it. Azure Data Manager for Agriculture is helping us do that.”

By combining a massive amount of previously siloed data into a central platform and eliminating manual processes, Azure Data Manager for Agriculture reduces time spent on data integrations thereby cutting down engineering effort and costs. Engineering teams were previously separated and focused only on their specific applications. “Each team was asking me, ‘Can you build this?’ There were a lot of redundancies,” says Benoit Mourot, IT Director of Product Management at Land O’Lakes. “We looked for a tool that would help us centralize those segregated applications. That’s when Azure Data Manager came up.”

Land O’Lakes data scientists are now able to derive better insights through comprehensive analytics and intelligent modeling. “Our data science teams were spending way too much time just getting the data structured appropriately so they could then do the modeling, the deep analytics on it,” Ryan says. Azure Data Manager has “driven a ton of efficiency, a ton of business value.” 

In one instance, Land O’Lakes IT teams were able to pull in data from a weather station in moments thanks to built-in connectors. Building that integration from the ground up would have taken at least a month and required ongoing maintenance. In the past, farmers had to stitch together data stored on computers, thumb drives, and equipment like tractors and tillers. With Azure Data Manager, configuration is simple.

Today farmers have access to real-time data and automated alerts provided directly by Land O’Lakes via its proprietary tools, Truterra and Winfield United Digital Agronomy platform, along with agronomic recommendations that allow farmers to know the best time and location to plant a crop given the forecast. “We’re bringing in weather data, irrigation data, soil information. We can bring that to the farmer and say, ‘in these conditions, this is probably the best route to take that can get you to more environmentally sound decisions, better profitability, and overall better efficiency in your operations,’” says Bekele. Since implementing Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, Land O’Lakes participating farmers have increased their productivity by up to 30 percent. 

Better visibility into the food supply chain and protecting the land for future generations

The impact is evident, not just in the field, but for consumers. Access to a greater quantity of quality data coupled with broad adoption of informed farming methods provides more transparency. Soon, consumers will be able to see in more detail the company’s farm-to-fork sustainable practices. “Consumers go to the store and buy products like Land O’Lakes butter and cheese. Their number one question is, ‘Well, how was my food grown? How was my food managed?’ We have the ability to bring more transparency to that, so people can make well-educated decisions about their food,” Bekele says.

Of course, access to information about where food comes from, how farm animals are treated, and environmental stewardship is also important to consumers—but no more important than it is to farmers. 

“Farmers themselves are very pro-sustainability. They want to do the right thing for the land because it is generationally handed over within families,” says Chakra Sankaraiah, Senior Director of Digital and Innovation at Land O’Lakes. “They want to make sure they leave the land in a much better shape than when they got it.” With Azure Data Manager, farmers get the specific data they need to ensure sustainable agricultural practices that protect the environment, support human well-being, and sustain healthy productivity over time—helping Land O’Lakes leave the land in good condition for generations to come. As part of this effort, the company also plans to adopt Microsoft Sustainability Manager to gain continuous visibility into emissions activities and water data.

“With Land O’Lakes and Microsoft, there is tremendous potential for how we can co-innovate and co-build,” Sankaraiah says. “There is a great opportunity for these two organizations to collaborate more deeply and really transform the agriculture industry and the food supply chain.”

Find out more about Land O’Lakes on Facebook and LinkedIn.